It’s interesting when you study marketing (not in a text book sense, but a real-world sense), learn new ideas, test strategies, and apply tactics you are able to see beyond the advertisements of other companies. You can decipher a campaign for real intentions.

For each of the four different strategies Scott talked about, I could think back to a recent experience when a business applied (or should have applied) that particular strategy.

This is one of my favorites aspects about being ‘on the inside’. You get to truly see and understand what everyone else is doing. It’s as if you’ve been taught a foreign language that most everyone else doesn’t know. The message comes through loud and clear to you; while others are left with merely a concept.

Let me illustrate my point…

Recently my wife was shopping for a new car. We went into one dealer and they kept talking about this special program. That with this special program you can save thousands off the MSRP. So we ask questions and inquire about this program. All we get back was vague responses that rely on circular logic.

In essence, you had to know someone else in the buyers program to get the benefits of the program yourself. Still to this day, I don’t know how someone else gets in the program in the first place.

Once we sit down to talk about ‘the numbers’. I told the guy, wait – I don’t want the special buyers’ program, I want the price without the program. He was shocked, as if no one had ever said that before.

Their real intentions, I believe, was to get you to commit to the car at the Buyer’s Program Price. Then, when it’s time to sign, you’re forced to identify your ‘connection’; and if you don’t have a ‘connection’ the price shoots up only after you’ve mentality committed to the car.

(For the record, he said we had three days after purchase to find a ‘connection’ for the buyers’ program, but I would rather pay the ‘regular’ price than run around town asking strangers if they were eligible to sponsor my car purchase.)

Fortunately for you, when it comes to business success, you’ve already got your connection right here. Just another benefit of being part of the ‘Secret Society of Entrepreneurs’.